On: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby develope...

[burke]

On this note: I’m sad ruby style guides generally ban “and” and “or”.

   raise(“a long error string”) unless valid

This reads much worse, when the string pushes the line near max width, than:

    valid or raise(“..

Of course it’s another idiom to learn but it’s not a difficult one when used simply.

[klodolph → burke]

That’s a very Perl idiom, did you previously write Perl?

[burke → klodolph]

No, I just think for all ruby is bought into these guard clauses, it's sad that we generally reject the feature that allows putting either the condition or the consequence first, depending on which reads better.

[graywh → burke]

the 2nd form implicitly returns the value of valid if it's truthy and nil if it's falsey; the 1st form always returns nil

[burke → graywh]

Indeed, but the return value of a guard clause shouldn't be important!